Rethinking how we give out gaming’s “academy awards”

Last night's DICE Awards could have done with fewer genre- and platform-specific nods.

To earn one of these, you should really be the best, not just the best in a small niche.

LAS VEGAS, NV—Last night's newly renamed DICE Awards (formerly the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Awards) were a ton of fun. The winners were well-chosen and mostly hard to argue with; Journey and The Walking Dead each deserved all of the many awards they received. Nerdist.com's Chris Hardwick was a charming host who handled a few hecklers with aplomb. Check out the #diceguys hashtag for by-the-minute reports from me and some other cool fuses who write about games for a living.

For all the good things about the awards show, though, one thing really stuck out like big, misplaced thumbtack. In this day and age, it's clear that demarcating video game awards by specific genres just doesn't make much sense.

Take the "Best Downloadable Game" award. This category might have made sense once, when downloadable games were generally the smaller, less ambitious cousins to the AAA games getting retail release. But things have changed. Two of the games in this category this year, The Walking Dead and Journey, were up for Game of the Year, proving downloadable games don't need to be set aside to get recognition anymore. And while Journey was named the best game of the year, somehow The Walking Dead was the best one you could download. Figure that one out.

Furthermore, downloadable games like Mark of the Ninja and The Unfinished Swan got their own nominations in more artistic categories. Not to mention that almost every game released on PC is technically a "downloadable" game these days. The method of delivery doesn't really change how a game should be considered against its peers.

The nominee list for Adventure Game of the Year makes it clear that the genre name is so broad as to be meaningless. The category included one traditional point-and-click adventure in The Walking Dead but also two games that could be considered "stealth action" (Assassin's Creed 3 and Dishonored), one that's more "action adventure" (Darksiders II), and one that's just a straight-up 2D platform game (New Super Mario Bros. U). Aside from The Walking Dead, all of those would probably be a better fit in the Action category… except that that genre seems reserved solely for games in which you primarily shoot things.

Why do we have a Web-based game of the year? None of the titles considered this year would even come close to being in the running for any of the awards that actually focus on things like gameplay and artistry. Heck, none of the Web-based nominees even earned a nomination for "Casual Game of the Year," (a category that itself somehow includes both Journey and the highly dissimilar Fairway Solitaire). The fact that the awful SimCity Social managed to garner an award here just shows how ridiculous the category is.

I could go on about how sports games hardly deserve a category when there are only three deserving nominees in a year, and how lumping single-player and massively multiplayer RPGs into a single category is like lumping together textbooks and narrative non-fiction into a single box. I could argue that separating mobile and handheld games into different categories is getting increasingly silly as the two begin to resemble one another, and how giving the fighting game niche its own category is also a bit silly when niches like "puzzle game" don't get similar consideration. But I think you get the point.

What's the solution? I suppose we could drill down even more, so that every game is accurately and precisely assessed with its peers according to highly specific gameplay mechanics and style. That would probably leave us with a laughably long list of categories, similar to the Grammys where sub-awards like "Best Soul Gospel Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, Choir, or Chorus" stand next to "Best Zydeco or Cajun Music."

Alternatively, we could go broader, simply lumping games into large groups like "portable/mobile," "console," "PC," and "online." But this kind of division would result in significant overlap. Where do you put an online game that's on PCs, consoles, and smartphones? Games lack the clear comedy/drama/mini-series division of the Emmys or the play/musical dichotomy of the Tonys.

Here's a thought: how about getting rid of genre and gameplay-based categories altogether? That seems to work for the Oscars, where divisions for "Best Romantic Comedy" or "Best Action film" don't exist. If films in those genres want to be considered, they have to stand up to the same artistic and technical standards as any other genre. When the Oscars do create categories for certain types of movies, it's only when the actual movie format really makes it significantly different from the rest of the pack: short subjects, animation, and foreign language releases, for example.

DICE has its fair share of awards that properly treat all games equally: art direction, character performance, sound design, gameplay engineering, animation, music composition, story, innovation, etc. Clearing away the unnecessary genre and platform-based awards would open up room for more of these. How about an award for Outstanding Achievement in Character Design? World-building/level design? Gameplay balance? Controls? Local multiplayer? There are plenty of possibilities.

This might not seem like a big deal, but as gaming's "academy awards," DICE reflects how we look at games, and how we consider the best of the best in the medium. A great game should have the ability to appeal to anyone who's receptive to the interactive form, not just people who are "into sports games" or who "like anything but RPGs" or who "just want to shoot stuff." Big winners last night like The Walking Dead and Journey largely transcended their genres to become must-play experiences for all gamers, not just fans of a small niche.

These types of games should have more opportunity for recognition as the industry continues to evolve from its fragmented past. We're getting to a point where a good game can be considered a good game by everyone, no matter what your specific tastes in genre or platform. If a game isn't worth considering against all of its peers, it shouldn't win a "good try" award just for being the best in a small corner of the gaming world.

Promoted Comments

to take a "glass half full" perspective, I'm actually glad that it's so hard to categorise games like they do movies year after year. Yes, the categories are used here stupid (that downloadable one is grand, it'd sounds like a "best DVD packaging" academy award is required to compete), but there's so much variety that I find it really difficult to compare a lot of the best games around, one of the best ways to stay on top in of the market is to be innovative.

So besides a "best horror shooter" award and maybe a "can it run Crysis: The incredibly advanced graphics" award, it's hopefully going to be too difficult to pin down games enough to ever hand out these kind of things in a consistent fashion. Which is why the DICE awards are an incredibly stupid idea, but also why I love being a gamer.

I think the big difference between things like the Oscars and gaming award shows is that the game award shows try and call out things based on the trappings of the game, and not as much the different things that go into a game. The oscars have awards for Cinematography, Sound Editing, Acting, Directing, and stuff like that, whereas all of the game award shows have "Best RPG" and "Best FPS Shooter" categories. While it's aimed at "fans" who want to see their favorite game get awarded for being the best of it's type, it's not aimed at awarding things that are the backbone of games.

These aren't all in every game, but they're generally the important pieces that go together to make a game, and each can individually be outstanding in a game. Just like an actor can do an outstanding job in a role in an otherwise mediocre movie, a game can have excellent animation or art direction even though it might not be a AAA blockbuster. I think these are much better things to call out than stuff like "Best Action RPG", which in most cases just calls out the big blockbusters in each genre.

Wow..... i did a double take when I saw that picture. There are literally 5 of those awards like 10 feet away from my desk on the cabinets, though they've been around far longer than I've been working here

I think the industry as a whole is still figuring itself out when it comes to awards. Games represent a combination of so many different art forms that I understand the complexity doing an award ceremony can create. How do you judge or compare digital experiences when it might encompass literally anything one can imagine. So while categories may be superficial to some degree, I'm not sure I can think of an easy solution there. Minimum bar of X games in category, or some kind of peer review by critics? Some genres see really few new games each year (racing sims come to mind). Would it be fair to bias them?

I must disagree with your below statement:

Quote:

A great game should have the ability to appeal to anyone who's receptive to the interactive form, not just people who are "into sports games" or who "like anything but RPGs" or who "just want to shoot stuff."

There is no game in existence that will universally appeal to people who like video games, while some games get wide critical appeal - I think expecting people who dislike the genre to even be able to appreciate it is a big stretch.

I disagree with the oft-expressed sentiment that downloadable games should no longer be a separate category. Yes, it's true that there have been download-only games this year which are every bit the equivalent of their AAA counterparts. But that is still not true of most of them.

Let's take Monaco for example. It's (by everything I've seen) going to be a damn good game. But despite all that, it's not in the same league as an XCOM or a Dishonored. And Monaco is pretty typical of what you can expect from a download-only game these days. Until the vast majority of download-only games are offering an experience which is just as rich as what the top-tier games offer, they should be in a separate category. That time has not yet come.

That would probably leave us with a laughably long list of categories, similar to the Grammys where sub-awards like "Best Soul Gospel Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, Choir, or Chorus" stand next to "Best Zydeco or Cajun Music."

To be fair with the Grammys, neither of those categories exist any more. They eliminated 31 categories for last year's awards. It's actually interesting to see their recent restructuring to see how they've tried to solve many of the same problems. What's happened in their history is a long and persistent campaign by various music groups to get new categories added (including the ridiculously obscure ones). Or new categories are added at the hight of a particular genre, such as the proliferation of "Alternative" and "Rap" categories in the 90s, that have waned in popularity over time. Video games do the same thing, certain trends come and go; and the award groupings should reflect that.

I do not consider gaming industry awards such as this to be credible, nor an indication of what I should buy, in the same way as I've not rushed out to buy or go see whichever film won an academy award.

Word of mouth from friends and reviews from trusted sources, along with my own gaming tastes and demo trials are what inform my buying decisions.

So your game won some faux metal crazy golf trophy? Who cares? Not this gamer, that's for certain.

There is no game in existence that will universally appeal to people who like video games, while some games get wide critical appeal - I think expecting people who dislike the genre to even be able to appreciate it is a big stretch.

Except that, as with movies and music, you don't actually need to like a particular game to recognize whether it's well-done or not.

As for the award situation, I think that some basic genres (very basic) should be represented. Sports and racing and piloting aircraft could all be part of a larger simulation group, as an brief example.

Award ceremonies are more for the voyeur tv/sports crowd than for interactive media.

When one of the main focuses of a category of entertainment is to redefine how a user interacts with the creation, those categories are going to have a value inversely proportionate to the quality of the games being reviewed.

You could break genres down in to how the user is challenged by them, what logic problem or reflex test is presented; but you'll end up with an award ceremony that requires a high level of understanding to observe.

Journey, for instance, deserves awards. It managed to incorporate multiplayer in a way that was unobtrusive seamless to both users and helped to tell the story. It also managed to express a plot almost entirely through play. You can't have a category ready to go for what the game did, if you had the category the game wouldn't be all that appealing.

On the technical side, it would be too obscure for me to know how to comment. Awards for least rubber banding in a high speed online game, or most precise collisions detection would be great, but the people qualified to judge those sorts of things are probably too busy for awards ceremonies.

to take a "glass half full" perspective, I'm actually glad that it's so hard to categorise games like they do movies year after year. Yes, the categories are used here stupid (that downloadable one is grand, it'd sounds like a "best DVD packaging" academy award is required to compete), but there's so much variety that I find it really difficult to compare a lot of the best games around, one of the best ways to stay on top in of the market is to be innovative.

So besides a "best horror shooter" award and maybe a "can it run Crysis: The incredibly advanced graphics" award, it's hopefully going to be too difficult to pin down games enough to ever hand out these kind of things in a consistent fashion. Which is why the DICE awards are an incredibly stupid idea, but also why I love being a gamer.

Can't we just go thru a list of all games "published" in a year, point to the ones that really stand-out, explain why, and award them for it? This works for good games and REALLY bad ones, and means $30k games can compete with $30M games.

Categories should be descriptive enough to fit the games themselves. Keep the basic 'genre' types (RPG, MMO, FPS, Adventure, Action, Puzzle, Point and Click, Word), add some platform specific categories (PS3, XBOX, PC, Mobile, Wii) and then branch into the more obscure (art direction, composing, music direction, graphics) and then add some oddball ones (language port, best use of destructible terrain, best cross platform game) just for fun.

Where specific games overlap in categories then those games can only be judged in the category that most fits the game. For example, and this is solely my opinion, I would classify The Walking Dead as an Adventure game with elements of Point and Click, Action and RPG but by and large it is an Adventure game. I am by no means an expert on classifying game types though so YMMV.

Heck, a category could be assigned to that as well, Best Use of Multiple Gameplay Mechanics.

to take a "glass half full" perspective, I'm actually glad that it's so hard to categorise games like they do movies year after year. Yes, the categories are used here stupid (that downloadable one is grand, it'd sounds like a "best DVD packaging" academy award is required to compete), but there's so much variety that I find it really difficult to compare a lot of the best games around, one of the best ways to stay on top in of the market is to be innovative.

So besides a "best horror shooter" award and maybe a "can it run Crysis: The incredibly advanced graphics" award, it's hopefully going to be too difficult to pin down games enough to ever hand out these kind of things in a consistent fashion. Which is why the DICE awards are an incredibly stupid idea, but also why I love being a gamer.

But the Academy Awards actually have a rough solution that might appeal to gamers?

Awards for best:- Story- Acting- Visual Effects- ...exist. These to me seem like some of the most primary attributes people care about games. Graphics (visual effects)? Story? Acting? I would be genuinely interested in a DICE-style award system for these things, as they're what is most interesting to me about games and their evolution. There are other new attributes for games (Gameplay comes to mind) that are also critical, but some of the core Oscar categories feel like good translations to gaming awards as well.

Also, the VGAs need to stop existing or get fixed. The DICE awards feel a lot more credible, but the VGAs and their presentation really drag the medium down unnecessarily.

In case anyone was wondering if The Dice awards are relevant to gamers or just some cynical entertainment lawyer's attempt to cash in by feeding pop culture to itself, their first game of the year award went to Goldeneye on the N64.

If you don't understand what I am trying to say, make sure the Auto-Aim option in your browser settings is set correctly.

Here's a thought: How about getting rid of genre and gameplay-based categories altogether?

Yes, let's do that. Thus ushering in the Academy Awards approach of only recognizing certain genres of movies, while ignoring achievements in others for no reason other than that they are considered fundamentally inferior to dramatic films set in modern times.

I don't much care for the genre specification of the DICE awards (NSMBU is an adventure game? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people?) But it's a hell of a lot better than the Oscar alternatives, where some movies just can't be recognized, no matter how good they are.

Quote:

When the Oscars do create categories for certain types of movies, it's only when the actual movie format really makes it significantly different from the rest of the pack: short subjects, animation, and foreign language releases, for example.

And people have been arguing to get animation removed from its ghetto too.

Quote:

A great game should have the ability to appeal to anyone who's receptive to the interactive form, not just people who are "into sports games" or who "like anything but RPGs" or who "just want to shoot stuff." Big winners last night like The Walking Dead and Journey largely transcended their genres to become must-play experiences for all gamers, not just fans of a small niche.

If you say so; I've not heard anything about either one. Nor do I plan to.

Shocking though it may be, there are people who simply wouldn't enjoy many "Best Picture" films. There are many great movies that are epic cinematic/acting/writing/etc achievements that just don't do it for a lot of people. And that's OK.

I believe that The Prestige is one of the greatest films of the last 10 years, but I also know that I'm in the small minority of people who have even heard of it, let alone think it's that good. That's fine.

The number of movies that "transcended their genres to become must-[watch] experiences for all [movie-goers]" is miniscule.

But the Academy Awards actually have a rough solution that might appeal to gamers?

Awards for best:- Story- Acting- Visual Effects- ...exist. These to me seem like some of the most primary attributes people care about games. Graphics (visual effects)? Story? Acting? I would be genuinely interested in a DICE-style award system for these things, as they're what is most interesting to me about games and their evolution. There are other new attributes for games (Gameplay comes to mind) that are also critical, but some of the core Oscar categories feel like good translations to gaming awards as well.

For the love of God NO!

Movies can't exist without Acting. Well, they can, but they'd just be landscapes or animals screwing around without narration. Thus, virtually every movie will have acting.

Not every game will have acting. Indeed, most games won't. The same goes for story. If you're going to have these cateogories, they need to focus on things that are important to videogames.

Does anyone outside of the industry really give a c*** what award is awarded to whom ? I have never followed videogame awards and likely never will. I barely ever follow the Oscars either. What kind of self-important idiots actually have to have an annual ceremony when they are told how wonderful they are ?

Seriously, this behavior is weird.

I work on Fortune 100 enterprise software projects. I've managed dozens in the past 20 years, from the biggest firms in the world to smaller local companies. Each project spent hundreds of millions of dollars. I helped educate tens of thousands of workers in how to get the most out of these systems. I helped people adapt to change.

Do I get an award ? Would I want one ? F*** no. The whole concept is bizarre. Sports I get - it is a competition, but art, and industry ? It seems rather vain in the very least...

Do I get an award ? Would I want one ? F*** no. The whole concept is bizarre. Sports I get - it is a competition, but art, and industry ? It seems rather vain in the very least...

Probably because it's mostly social politics with a hint of actual artistic discretion (I wouldn't raise it to the level of calling it critique) thrown in.

Seriously, it's a forum for people to play "who is best liked by this inner circle" games with a very thin veneer of credibility through a cover story of more appealing reasons.

Which if you have any exposure to the art world, you'll quickly realize is actually how most of the art world runs > 90% of the time (there's some slim margin that actually does try to keep to honest critiquing practices--arguments about how subjective that remains are still fine, but it's at least an attempt to ignore who the artist is and focus on the art itself). If you stop imagining this being about coding software, and instead imagine it's about the art world side of video games, it all makes a lot more sense.

It's not that I can't play these games, but it's not what I want to devote my life to, and it's very much why I never pursued a pro art career.

Does anyone outside of the industry really give a c*** what award is awarded to whom ? I have never followed videogame awards and likely never will. I barely ever follow the Oscars either. What kind of self-important idiots actually have to have an annual ceremony when they are told how wonderful they are ?

Seriously, this behavior is weird.

I work on Fortune 100 enterprise software projects. I've managed dozens in the past 20 years, from the biggest firms in the world to smaller local companies. Each project spent hundreds of millions of dollars. I helped educate tens of thousands of workers in how to get the most out of these systems. I helped people adapt to change.

Do I get an award ? Would I want one ? F*** no. The whole concept is bizarre. Sports I get - it is a competition, but art, and industry ? It seems rather vain in the very least...

Most people do like recognition of some kind. Most places I've been have some sort of "employee of the year" or something. Not everyone cares, but some do. Is that a bad thing? Not really.

If they just got rid of the emphasis on having a "winner" and simply provided an unranked list of games that are considered good, and WHY they are considered good, then you wouldn't need any categories at all. You'd have the categories to some extent in why a game is considered worth checking out, but the categories would be more fluid, and if someone on the nomination committee made a good argument for why a free download only game for the Virtual Boy qualified this year, then maybe it would be included. They could be like mini-reviews that only focused on the good stuff.

"Excellent pacing in a story-on-rails shooter""Fantastic artistic style for a limbless one-person developer working in the psychological thriller""Can't stop singing the end credits song"

I think the big difference between things like the Oscars and gaming award shows is that the game award shows try and call out things based on the trappings of the game, and not as much the different things that go into a game. The oscars have awards for Cinematography, Sound Editing, Acting, Directing, and stuff like that, whereas all of the game award shows have "Best RPG" and "Best FPS Shooter" categories. While it's aimed at "fans" who want to see their favorite game get awarded for being the best of it's type, it's not aimed at awarding things that are the backbone of games.

These aren't all in every game, but they're generally the important pieces that go together to make a game, and each can individually be outstanding in a game. Just like an actor can do an outstanding job in a role in an otherwise mediocre movie, a game can have excellent animation or art direction even though it might not be a AAA blockbuster. I think these are much better things to call out than stuff like "Best Action RPG", which in most cases just calls out the big blockbusters in each genre.

Movies can't exist without Acting. Well, they can, but they'd just be landscapes or animals screwing around without narration. Thus, virtually every movie will have acting.

Not every game will have acting. Indeed, most games won't. The same goes for story. If you're going to have these cateogories, they need to focus on things that are important to videogames.

Acting isn't critical for all games, but there are games where the difference between poor or mediocre acting and good (or great, someday?) acting makes a tremendous difference. Same for story. Some games are tremendous based just on their mechanics (gameplay) but others lean heavily on a good story and should be rewarded for success.

Many types of film can and do exist outside the confines of acting, too (documentaries, e.g.). A broad set of categories is welcome, but I think that by shifting focus from narrowly banded genres to other categories that cut across many different kinds of games the biggest annual achievements can be more readily recognized.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. I'm not the sort of person who watches award shows so I have a bit of a hard time grasping what they are for.

If these are for the developers, then it would seem like you'd want separations along technically different portions of game design like physics, ui design, or rigging. As a professional you wouldn't want your perfectly textured sculpted and rigged models held back by poor voice acting, and it wouldn't make sense for that to be the case.

If they are for gamers, I have no idea, find a gamer who watches awards shows and ask them about it.

As a gamer who vaguely likes award shows, I'd prefer the awards to be for things like model design, UI integration, voice work, etc. And, of course, a category or two for games that are "best in genre," provided they can manage to not mangle that, a la the Grammys giving Jethro Tull an award for being "heavy metal."

I was with you until you said that handheld and mobile games are even remotely similar.

Can you find me a non-port of any game like Fire Emblem Awakening on iOS? If so, I'd be very interested. But they don't exist.

Because non-port mobile games are usually quite crap... or meaningless time waster "puzzle" games. And by "puzzle" I mean "Repeat the same action over and over until you find the exact spot you are supposed to hit."

Reading the Oscars analogies, I had a thought about their categories and the current gaming landscape: Oscars have movie categories for "global release" movies, but (if I'm not mistaken) only one category for "foreign" movies, where all foreign candidates compete regardless of category. If we take the analogy over to gaming, we could say that all gaming platforms are "the world", while each platform is a separate "country". Maybe it would make sense for games to have category awards only for "global" releases, i.e. games available on multiple (if not all) platforms, while the platform-exclusive games would be judged separately.

In this case, Journey is understandably a great game, but people who don't own PS3s cannot play it without either buying the console or at least having a friend who owns it. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, has no such limitation. This introduces an unbalancing element in evaluating candidates.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.